This series of fragments, anecdotes, random observations, and high-flying speculations has now made it through Greek philosophy. Of course, Plotinus was not the last philosopher to write in Greek; a century after him, for example, Hypatia was publishing philosophical and astronomical treatises, but none of them survive today, and thereby hangs a sad and sordid tale. In any case, I have already omitted enough major figures to fill a philosophical library. Time for a little summing-up of my own.
I said in the beginning (#1) that the history of philosophy was bit like Jurassic Park: the behemoths of the past, interesting and even beautiful on their own, become something quite different when they get together. This metamorphosis confronts us already, here at the end of the Greeks, because when you look at the philosophers I have discussed—look well and long at them, rather glancing quickly as I have here—you see that something is missing from the group: there is no woman in it.
There were indeed woman philosophers in the ancient world—Plato’s mother, Perictione, has left us a few tantalizing pages, and Hypatia herself was prominent enough to be murdered and dismembered by a Christian mob in 415 CE. But the fact remains that 800 years of Greek philosophy contain almost nothing written by women.
This persistent absence of woman philosophers can hardly be an accident. Nor, I think, is it merely the result of ancient and long-lasting prejudice. It is, rather, specially intrinsic to Western philosophy itself, which has always tried to make the realm of rational discussion—the “space of reasons,” as it has come to be called—our space, open only to an in-group.
Plato—perhaps because of his mother—allowed women into his philosophically sophisticated guardian class, and openly claimed that at least a few women could be as bright as any man (Republic 455d). But Aristotle, far from refuting this possibility, does not even mention it. And his concept of being as ousia (#8) provided an enduring vocabulary for this tacit magistricide: women, slaves, and later people of color were assigned the role of matter in human communities; their very nature was to be dominated by gentlemen embodying the human form, reason. And so it remained.
Philosophy was, thus, not indifferent to the prejudices of its day, but structurally susceptible to them. Today’s exclusions of women and people of color is not merely a foul and self-serving habit, like American philosophy’s exclusion of Jews until the mid-20th Century, but was actively considered to be integral to the right order of the universe.
What to do about this? Ultimately, I suspect we will have to euthanize Western philosophy and give birth to a new, post-Western one; but right now, there are a number of things we shouldn’t do.
(1). We shouldn’t deny the exclusions—even to the extent of claiming, for example, that there is a corpus of philosophical writings by women and people of color that needs only to be collected and published. As far as we know now, there are very few writings in the Western tradition attributable to women before the 17th Century, while people of color were basically excluded until well into the 20th.
All this for at least two reasons.
First, philosophy, unlike its ever-antagonist poetry, has always required a good deal of training, and exclusions already operated on that level: with very few exceptions, women and people of color could not get the education needed to do philosophy.
And second, when they somehow did get the requisite training, the resulting works were assiduously destroyed—like those of Hypatia, which were burned when she was murdered. Where not assiduously destroyed, those works were assiduously ignored, like those of Anton Wilhelm Amo, the 18th Century German philosopher from Ghana whose critique of Descartes might have been of value to the post-Kantians in Germany—if they had bothered to read them.
The great old libraries of Europe, such as the Vatican Library in Rome and the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, may have relevant manuscripts in their more distant vaults, but they are well-swept by now, and the outlook is not good.
(2). A common strategy for those who cannot deny their sins is to ignore them. One way of ignoring philosophy’ exclusions, abundant in the specialized hothouses of today’s universities, is to focus merely on this or that individual philosopher, overlooking the fact that he (!) belongs to a tradition that has excluded so many. It is only when you put the behemoths together, as I have noted, that it comes out clearly that they are virtually all men, and mainly Europeans at that.
(3). An understandable reaction to all this is to reject the Western tradition altogether: you can argue that philosophy has always been a global enterprise, with South and East Asia, Africa, and South America having traditions of their own. Which is true—but communication among those traditions was minimal until the modern era, presumably because premodern technologies did not allow for the transfer of writings from one continent to another; all Western philosophers could know of other kinds of thought was rumor and hearsay. Western philosophy thus developed as a distinct and isolated tradition, which certainly impoverishes it. But that poverty, for better or worse, produced today’s Westerners—and Westerners, by now, inhabit the entire world .
(4): Veneration of our intellectual ancestors is clearly out of the question. But condemnation is a moral judgment we are not entitled to make, for our moral superiority to our forebears is dubious at best. How do we know that we are not imbibing the prejudice and blindness of our age, as they did of theirs? David Hume was a wretched racist and we see through his racism, but how do we know that we are not committing other sins of our own? We hope to be better people than he was; but part of that is acknowledging that we may in fact be worse.
So Yes, the statue of Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile ought to be taken down; it should never have been erected in the first place. We must remember our forebears, and study their virtues and their vices; but we must not venerate them. Some of their sins and errors live on in us; and we have probably invented a few new ones as well.